These Chores Don’t Count? On Men’s Hidden “Second Shift”

Housework—as it is defined by those who keep the statistics—does not include many chores traditionally handled by men.

The stereotype: “Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else” —Letty Cottin Pogrebin

The reality: “The fellow who owns his own home is always coming out of a hardware store” —Kin Hubbard

Jobs using these do not get counted in major studies of housework (photo used under Creative Commons agreement)

For decades, The Bureau of Labor Statistics has conducted the Americans Time Use Survey (ATUS) and the University of Michigan has conducted the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Through surveys and time use diaries, these studies track employment patterns, as well as how Americans divide their time among their daily work and non-work tasks.

No surprise—these projects have consistently found that men spend more time at work than women, and women spend more time on housework than men. These gaps, which were once huge, have significantly narrowed over the decades, until stabilizing in about the late 1990s.

Two specific findings illustrate where we are today. First, the 2011 ATUS found that full-time employed men average 3.5 more working hours a week than full-time employed women. Second, the 2005 PSID found that, among dual-earner couples, women spend about 4.5 more hours per week on household chores than men. This household work gap is often referred to as women’s “Second Shift” (i.e., both men and women work their first shifts at work, but women also work a second shift of housework), based on the title of Dr. Arlie Hochschield’s excellent study on this issue.

So far, there’s nothing controversial here, and I bet these numbers ring true for many of us, even those who do a significant amount of household chores. The fact is women do somewhat more around the house than we do.

But look at those numbers again. Taking both paid work and household work together, that’s only a one hour difference per week [edited]. Despite the media’s constant harping on “chore wars” (see this article or this blog post for typical superficial “journalism” on this subject), this doesn’t seem to me like the demise of feminism and equal opportunity that it is often made out to be.

And, in my opinion, the one hour difference per day doesn’t even tell the whole story.

As far as I could tell (and I pored over the ATUS survey instrument and data files- all for you, dear reader, all for you), ATUS only includes meal preparation, cleaning, laundry, child care, grocery shopping, and bill paying in its categorization of “household chores”.

Housework was defined as “core chores,” or routine housework that people generally do not enjoy doing such as washing dishes, laundry, vacuuming floors and dusting … Routine housework, like cooking dinner or making beds, was captured … . Other activities such as home repairs, mowing the lawn, and shoveling snow were not in the study. Items such as gardening are usually viewed as more enjoyable; the focus here is on core housework.

All I can say to that is Wha-wha-whaaaaaat!!!??? Shoveling snow is enjoyable and thus should not count as a chore? Mowing the lawn in August is enjoyable? Fixing a clogged toilet is enjoyable? Grouting? Painting a room? Hauling air conditioners up the stairs? Doing the taxes? Changing the car’s oil? Crawling through the musty crawl space to repair a leaky pipe?

While I admit some “men’s chores” are pretty enjoyable (after all, there is satisfaction in repairing something in the house yourself instead of calling a repairman), I think making such a large distinction between “unenjoyable routine housework” and “enjoyable chores” is, well, just plain wrong. Some people get loads of satisfaction from cooking or from maintaining a clean house, too. But enjoyability is not the main issue.

The big problem is that “definitive” studies like ATUS and PSID emphasize tasks that are typically performed more by women as “household chores”, while either minimizing or excluding more typical men’s chores. I get that “our” chores are not quite as routine or everyday and therefore harder to measure, but most of us working dads are also on-call handymen (I love my wife and she is an awesome partner who does more than her fair share, but she’s not the one bailing water out of the basement after a flood).

And, more importantly, the flaws in the data exaggerate the housework gap, failing to recognize our contributions. As a result, the men’s “second shift” gets short shrift.

You know what they say about research and data—“Garbage in, garbage out” (o yeah, they don’t count that chore either…)

How do you feel about the division of labor and household chores? Let’s discuss in the comments section.

About Scott Behson

Scott Behson is a Professor of Management at Fairleigh Dickinson Scott Behson is a Professor of Management at Fairleigh Dickinson University, a busy involved dad, and the author ofThe Working Dad’s Survival Guide: How to Succeed at Work and at Home, the Amazon #1 best-seller helping dads achieve better work-life balance. He runs thewww.FathersWorkandFamily.com blog, writes for Harvard Business Review, The Huffington Post, and Time, and has appeared on MSNBC, Fox, NBC and NPR. Scott was a speaker at the recent White House Summit for Working Families. He lives in Nyack, NY with his wife, Amy, and son, Nick. Contact him @ScottBehson on twitter.

[…] the folk at The Good Men Project say that men’s housework isn’t counted in the regularly-quoted housework tallies. That said, I’ve seen studies which count ‘commuting’ into weekly-work tallies. […]

[…] to point out that this is pretty limited to the middle class. The Good Men Project recently posted an article about the ways in which typically men’s chores are not counted in tally ups because […]

It’s sad that it’s come down to this His chores, her chores kind of thing. Pre-kids, when my wife and I both worked, we shared household chores. Not by assignment but simply our of willingness. Fortunately we were able to own our own home so I was afforded the responsibility of maintaining the home … something I learned how to do from my father (countless hours of observing). When my wife was a stay at home housewife, she picked up more of the household duties simply because she had more time and more importantly because she wanted to. When we… Read more »

Shoveling snow is enjoyable and thus should not count as a chore? Mowing the lawn in August is enjoyable? Fixing a clogged toilet is enjoyable? Grouting? Painting a room? Hauling air conditioners up the stairs? Doing the taxes? Changing the car’s oil? Crawling through the musty crawl space to repair a leaky pipe?

Just because it’s enjoyable doesn’t mean it’s not work. And there’s nothing wrong with enjoying work. That doesn’t diminish it, or its contribution, in any way. I often enjoy cooking, but the hour of prep time peeling and chopping vegetables and making ingredients can be a chore. Today I’ll be making shiskabob for about three hours, and I expect my back will be very stiff and painful afterwards, as usual. Just because I and my family will think it was worth it doesn’t mean it was any less work or that my back won’t be hurting.

It’s difficult to understand the confusion over this.To raise a family in modern culture demands that gender apropriate roles be cast aside simply in order to function.Sudden shifts in the socio-political-climate beyond our control happen all the time.The recent financial collaspe and war,as examples, are not anamolies but rather are common features of American life.These things cause great upsets and gender conventions hamper one’s abilities to adjust on the fly.The workload will NEVER be equal,ever.

Everyone- Thank you for this great discussion! You all raise interesting ideas and have given me a lot to consider. In this and many other gender divide issues- the key is for the couple to work out an agreement that works well for them, regardless of societal gender roles. In fact, there’s a lot of research that shows that egalitarian relationships in which there is shifting and fluid responsibilities between spouses often leads to less dis-satisfaction around these issues. In fact, statistics on divorce show that couples in which there is a strict gender divide along traditional lines face the… Read more »

“Shifting and fluid responsibilities between spouses”. That pretty much describes me and the Wife. With my job in heavy construction providing NO way of scheduling anything, we’ve pretty much adopted a policy of ‘Whoever’s available’ to get things done that we’re both capable of doing(cook dinner, cleaning etc.). Now that we’re both getting on in years and find our bodies can be occassionally uncoporative, it’s more important than ever to be able to ‘Pick up the slack’ for each other.

We’re clearly not a predominantly agriculture society anymore. On a family farm, there really is no distinction between the household repairs and the labor shift. It’s basically all one collection of chores to do, whether it directly results in money or not. This whole artificial distinction we make between “work” and “housework” is a total industrial and post-industrial thing we’ve just arbitrarily made up to pretend that there are two totally different spaces, public and private.

So much to say. So much to say. A specific comment: Perhaps it would help if the time-use research had some way of including a more qualitative set of factors like “leisure” and “enjoyability” and “appreciation” to tease out the perceived gaps from the actual ones. It is also important to capture these gaps over time, since things often change after the birth of the first child. More general comment: Certainly, the “second shift” is becoming less of a gender-linked phenomenon, but entrenched inequalities related to the division of labor at home continue to exist and have important and measurable… Read more »

How do you define “inadequate” or “inflexible” employer demands and expectations? Defining them as inadequate supposes certain values that may not be universally held and may be out of place to ascribe to something like a business — it not being a person with “values” so to speak, anyway. Is it really the purpose of business to help finance employee lifestyle decisions such as childbirth? Is having children a task absolutely necessary for society to prioritize and pour resources into? If so, how do we measure it? Is someone having eight children better than someone having one? If so, by… Read more »

A company with a long-term approach to employees they value should see that working with employees and helping them with work-family balance helps achieve sustainable, long-term success (there’s a lot of evidence for this- but just check out the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list for easy examples). Another example- The most definitive study on the effects of telecommuting, which involved over 46 organizations and 12,500 employees, found that part-time telecommuting results in: ■Higher employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment ■Slightly higher levels of employee performance (All the accumulated evidence shows that, for appropriate jobs, partial telecommuting at… Read more »

A lot of companies do everything in their power to routinize work and systematize it so that the individual contributions of any one employee — especially a “below the line” employee — are not such that going without them would materially affect an operation for long, and indeed so that they can be easily replaced. Not every company is of the same type or contains the same sort of jobs. The long-term trend, though, is for companies to immunize themselves against the personal lifestyle choices of their employees by making as many jobs as possible less critical. The unfortunate effect… Read more »

Straw men everywhere! @Marc – Family leave legislation is “inadequate” for several reasons, among them: 1) it only applies to larger companies, which leaves a huge portion of workers ineligible; 2) it is unpaid, which means another large portion of low- and middle-income workers can’t afford it; and 3) the reinstatement rules have not been robustly enforced, which means even when a worker is eligible and can afford leave they are still sometimes risking their jobs/careers if they take it. This is not to say the legislation is totally without value. For one, apropos of this conversation, it was written… Read more »

Notice that all these choices are framed as choices for employees, nor employers. Where are the choices for the employer in all this? Is the employer not supposed to have any? And therein lies part of the answer to why society still hasn’t come to a reasonable way of grappling with such problems. We’re not really addressing them all that forthrightly. When family is celebrated above all things, it immediately sounds right. But only when leaving questions of cost and balance out of the equation. It is not a no-cost problem when employees disappear for months, weeks, days, even hours… Read more »

This is a crucial point. Rather too much ‘gender equality’ is about accusing many men for not having the same priorities as many women and opposing the idea that men should have any advantage in the workplace or elsewhere for putting a greater priority on work relative to domestic attachments and the maintenance of the domestic environment than women do. It is also about ideologically-driven resistance to the reality that social networks that are non-intimate and not emotionally affirming, but assertive, agentic, competitive, and agonistic, forming broad, shallow, and hierarchical networks (i.e. a sort of socialization that men often prefer),… Read more »

I guess I need to repeat a few things: – “Equality” in this context is about both men and women having a *menu* of choices (real, viable options) for how they spend their time. That includes a man putting “a greater priority on work” and the woman in his life “picking up the tab” at home. And vice versa. My concern is not *what* people choose, it’s *whether* they really have the opportunity. – It IS important to include the employer’s point of view when discussing work/family dynamics. Employers have promises to keep. They have *limited resources* to fulfill those… Read more »

Kari, I agree with most of what you are saying here. My problem is that rather too much talk about ‘gender equality’ would cease to be cogent if we took seriously the possibility (and, I would argue, reality) that looking at the very general rules for the entire population: a) the identity of men and women tend to be focused on different things – women more on their bodies and their group belonging and men on their agency and their status; b) men and women tend to prioritize different sorts of environments when it comes to establishing their identity, with… Read more »

Equal opportunity vs. equal outcomes. The fulcrum around which such distinctions operate is the idea of fairness. At this point, our society is having a thousands of years long battle over what equal opportunity means, and it is nearly always disingenuous no matter which of many possible sides are doing the talking. This is because advantage is involved, and human nature naturally strains to claim it. That slipperiness, given human nature, may well render anything approaching fairness unobtainable not just now, but until the point we genetically mutate and/or wipe each other out in wars so as not to seek… Read more »

What constitutes ‘fairness’? Surely that is the key question here. And what does ‘equality’ really mean when people aren’t ‘equal’ in most senses, but are actually rather different? Surely we should be aiming for ‘equity’ instead.

“Can those who pursue fairness over advantage survive against the power of those who would not?” A resounding YES! Just look at the last 200 years. The status of women, people of color, GLBT, and the disabled have all been dramatically and radically improved in that time period. “Is anyone willing to give up advantage for fair play?” A resounding typically not. That’s why we have legislation and litigation. And marches on Washington. What Scott’s article doesn’t explain is that this (purported) one-hour difference in total “work” per week is a notable change from even a few years ago. Women… Read more »

The gendered priorities of “men” and “women” are culturally constructed and socialized. The categories of “masculine” and “feminine” are each taken by many to be entirely inclusive of a list of desires, priorities, and preferences and exclusive of one another. The truth is, the masculine-feminine dynamic is a spectrum, and to list differences between men and women in terms of what they want and how they thrive is to perpetuate gender stereotypes. If there is truth to your statements above, it is that there are traditionally “feminine” and “masculine” preferences; however, these do not exclusively correspond to “women” and “men.”… Read more »

Sarah, Of course the gendered priorities are culturally constructed and socialized. For that matter, the elimination of those gendered priorities would be no less – and probably rather more – culturally constructed and socialized. I think that you are dodging my point. I only spoke of tendencies of men and women as groups. There are obviously numerous exceptions to group tendencies and we should allow for such. However, one doesn’t have to say that a general tendency applies to every member of a group to acknowledge that there is in fact a general tendency. Taken as groups, there are significant… Read more »

Alastair, I understand that male and female bodies are not identical and I am very interested in reconsidering what kind of credible conclusions we can draw from that. But ascribing anything other than a “neutral” position to sexed bodies is entirely a social construction. We could just as easily say that women are externally oriented because they excrete blood and expel babies and men are internally oriented because they seek to put their penis in things. Or we could say that because women are relationship-oriented they are better suited to govern countries, where working with diverse people is central, and… Read more »

Also –
I wholeheartedly agree that class differences continue to be a huge problem and American myths of individuality are often detrimental.
And I agree that feminism is not an endpoint, but is one of several movements pursuing the common goal of justice and equality.

You do not at all need to repeat yourself when some of your ideas are disagreed with any more than you need to strike down putative straw men. If anything, that would be, as it heretofore was, counterproductive, assuming reasonable intelligence on the part of your audience, which should be the default position until rendered insupportable by more than disagreement over specifics. “Employee satisfaction” as a metric of business success and productivity, and particularly skewed toward validating the satisfaction of the employee skipping out of work hours (for reasons cheerable or execrable), is a fuzzy metric indeed. It is meaningless… Read more »

I believe I do need to repeat and clarify my position if responses to my comments take issue with a position I didn’t espouse and don’t hold.

Generally speaking, I think it’s better for any relationship to be reciprocal and not so one sided. So if one employee is taking advantage of everyone else, that’s not okay. However, looking at things through a win-lose lens tends to stunt creativity and fuel resentment. There are win-win-win scenarios.

Because the majority of humans will reproduce and having employment which caters to that is essential to a better society? If some employers had their way they’d pay well below minimum wage, so no the employers choice doesn’t matter as much as the citizens. The well-being of the employee matters and at the moment there are barriers to many parents to employment where their children suffer because of issues to do with childcare, we could have more people working if there were more family-friendly policies in place. Do you think it is right that so many parents are forced to… Read more »

Cutting off at the first sentence, is it really the fulcrum of a better society that everyone reproduce? If so, is there any point at which this process ends? By any metric I can reckon, the planet cannot sustain a “better outcome” of most people reproducing. In fact it would be disaster, accelerating mass starvation and war. Is this an acceptable outcome? In such a scenario, who is likely to live — first world or third world children and adults? What is the price of a first world opportunity versus a third world life? It would be easier to think… Read more »

If 2 parents have 1-2 children, then the population will go backwards (since not everyone has kids). If it gets bad enough then gov’s will have to bring in population control methods to limit population growth.

Marc, While we may not be reproducing at a great rate, our current alternative is one in which governments seek to mobilize the majority of the populace for the service and expansion of the economy. If we were cutting back on the reproduction rate and living simpler lives, consuming (and hence producing) less, downscaling, and devoting more time, effort, and resources to the care of the environment, that would be very positive. However, the main reason the reproduction rate has fallen is not because we want to consume less, but because we want to consume more as individuals and having… Read more »

There is an implicit assumption here, a sort of “we” being posited, as if the first world were static rather than volatile. In Germany, there is a huge influx of Turks; in Spain, Moroccans and others; in Greece, there is the fascistic Golden Dawn arising at least in good part out of the influx of immigrants; in France, there is Le Pen, there are racial problems in Britain, and in America, the Latino population will outnumber the whites in some states fairly soon — I’ve seen various figures from 2030 to 2050 quoted. Perhaps I am taking too much of… Read more »

I agree that in many hetero couples with traditional gender roles, men do a lot of the difficult “handy” housework that comes with home ownership. But there are a few glaring things that I see missing from this article. 1) Many couples (especially young couples) do not own homes. They rent, and their maintenance, shoveling, mowing and landscaping are taken care of by their landlord. In these situations, do we tell the young men that in order to keep up an equal amount of work, they should do more dishes, cooking, cleaning or laundry? If you didn’t have those man… Read more »

How do you define “nurturing”? Is that the cuddling thing? Parenting includes considerably more than that, including teaching a kid how to…take out the garbage. Hardly cuddling. Simply being nearby when kids are playing in case something goes wrong might not be much of a chore, except for letting them make their own mistakes, but it does foreclose being someplace else entirely.

I would define nurturing parenting as simply being involved. That means everything from being available to hear how your child’s day at school was to teaching them how to do chores of all kinds to helping with homework to supervising their playtime to hosting birthday parties and sleepovers to attending PTA meetings to carting them around to play rehearsal and soccer practice… And so on. These are jobs that are overwhelmingly expected of the mother (and if she doesn’t do them she is neglectful, or too focused on her career, or shouldn’t have had children if she can’t care for… Read more »

I don’t think one has to be considered an independent, feminist woman to work or to work while still having children. Many if not most women work for money rather than as a political statement, and wouldn’t count themselves either as having feminist ideals and sympathies or not having them simply for the fact that they work. Society presently requires the income of two partners at all but the top and bottom ends of the scale if one wishes for any kind of security or freedom from the dreaded knock of the bill collector.

I don’t think so either, but historically women have been told “you can have it all” when really it’s “you have no choice but to do it all.” As I said in my comment @Archy, the only way we’re going to have full gender equality – and, for that matter, the best way to achieve an egalitarian society and the most enjoyable human experience for all genders – is if we stop telling men that doing “feminine” chores somehow discounts their masculinity. On the contrary, it seems to me that generally the men who follow and comment on this site… Read more »

I agree. It’s amazing how the outwardly roughest-edged guys can be so nose-up-in-the-air dainty about washing dishes or cleaning toilets. Most of the men I’ve known like this have had mothers who pampered the daylights out of them and never let them lift a finger around the house; often the worst were only children. I don’t believe a child should work enough to cut off his childhood at the knees, but learning to pitch in a bit when young makes for a healthier and happier adult, and one much easier for others to get along with. The young boy whose… Read more »

“And so on. These are jobs that are overwhelmingly expected of the mother (and if she doesn’t do them she is neglectful, or too focused on her career, or shouldn’t have had children if she can’t care for them), whereas when a man does them we laud him for his exceptionally unusual above-and-beyond involvement in his child’s life.” Because of sexist assumptions that men don’t do much for their kids so we think men are extra special if they take notice. But growing up I had my father spend plenty of time with me, and also I saw men coaching… Read more »

110% agree with this. In it’s simplest form, my view on this issue can be summed up in the statement: the only way we are going to achieve total gender equality is if we start teaching men and allowing men to be and do things that are traditionally considered “feminine”.

I’m not sure what jobs at home would be considered feminine, I live with my mother n brother and we all pitch in and share the workload. I tend to do the more masculine jobs I guess, maintenance of house (saved many $$$ in repairs), yard work, external cleaning (spray paths, wash windows, clean patio, I also vacuum, cook n clean inside at times too. I do my own washing, etc and we share the cooking duties. I don’t have kids though so no chance to look after babies, looking after my puppy when he was young scared me enough… Read more »

Sarah, you do realize men are expected to work more than women right at a job? Women on average work less than 40 hours then come home to do their second shift, whilst men on average just do more hours on the job and fewer at home, it roughly evens out but has men working half an hour more when you tally both up last time I saw the labor stats. This only counts hours and not exertion though, mental or physical, washing dishes doesn’t tax much energy but I’m sure doing it with a rugrat knocking shit over n… Read more »

Here you are leaving out a large chunk of women who do work 40 or more hours per week and who are still expected to come home, cook dinner, help with homework, etc. This daily second shift is not expected of men; their expectation is that they should work harder and longer hours at their job. On another note, it is precisely because of the position you take in this comment that many women do not or can not progress in high power, highly mentally and physically demanding jobs and also hope to have a family. When people promote the… Read more »

I’m with sarah here. I believe the work shift and the house-work shifts need to be shared in a way that works for the whole family- and not to overload one role on one person and the other on the other.

There is still a lot of work to overcome traditional roles when those roles don’t suit the people involved.

But is it strictly true that women only “have to” go home and take care of their families … or do they also simply “want to” do so? I hope most people of either sex would want to go home and take care of their family as soon as practicably possible. When an employer is faced with the choice between promoting someone who works more hours and another who works less, is it really fair to blame that employer, or “the system,” for the choice to promote the person who works more hours than the other? If the person who… Read more »

No one can have it all. Not women, not men. Maybe maybe maybe, a family working as a team can. But this assumes everyoe does a equitable (not necessarily equal) share, appreciates the other, and works out arragements that work for all.

equitable- everyone’s needs and priorities considered before decisions are made
equal- everyone gets the same

Agreed. Trying to do everything equally can lead to keeping unhealthy scorecards and being an overall life nit. It’s almost impossible to split everything equally for long anyway. Trying to be equitable, by contrast, can and should be the basis for a whole relationship.

“Here you are leaving out a large chunk of women who do work 40 or more hours per week and who are still expected to come home, cook dinner, help with homework, etc. This daily second shift is not expected of men; their expectation is that they should work harder and longer hours at their job.” All of this of course was simply averages that I’ve seen, some familes have women as breadwinner, man as SAHD, etc. The increased hours worked extend up to 60+ for some men, just as women do say 40+ at work and the rest at… Read more »

When the repairman gets paid to fix something in a house, he’s doing work, and that labor counts as labor. Maybe he enjoys it, maybe not, but the paid labor stats don’t care if you enjoy it or not, so why should it matter for unpaid labor? If two people do the same job, one gets paid and one doesn’t, the work is still the same work. Labor is labor, whether you’re a professional or a volunteer.

Having shared accommodation with many groups and persons over the years, one of the things that you soon learn is that people have different expectations of how the house or home environment should be. Some have extremely high expectations and others are very happy to live in a house where people hold lower standards of tidiness. In such situations the people with the highest expectations can frequently impose their standards upon everyone else and accuse everyone else of not pulling their weight when their standards are not met. Other people genuinely can be selfish and lazy and expect others to… Read more »

Scott…I think we should add to this the hours,days,months and years men spend coaching and mentoring not only their children,but others children as well. Coaching a single team takes me 20/25 hours a week,plus money out of my pocket for 6 months a year. Just today, a mom said,not more than 30mins ago,that it was MY job to do this.

Even when science isn’t sponsored directly, it is often in bed with advocacy or co-opted by interest grouops. There is little of practical effect or intellectual value that can stand on equal footing with science, but science only achieves its credibility because its premises can be freely and openly questioned. Regardless of where one stands on the issues that may surround any bit of science, questioning and verifying are always healthy and indeed at the core of the scientific process itself. In our media-saturated world, in which science is sought out and reported particularly for its value as controversy, corporations… Read more »

I really wish more media organizations employed writers who better understood the scientific research process- especailly those who can identify unintended or intended biases in social science research.

As someone who has conducted social research and taken many a course in survey writing and research methods, and who now works in media, I definitely understand where you’re coming from. But many journalists don’t take it as their goal to criticize research. Their goal is primarily to inform the public that a research project is happening and the findings say… blah blah blah. These news reports will not skew the findings any further than the researcher did her/himself. They’re simply reporting without tone or judgment. It is not always the media’s job to expose biased research, though to be… Read more »

Sarah- I may have overstated this phonomenon in my comments. But this issue is a bit of a hobby-horse for me. Recently, several MAJOR news outlets (NYTimes, WSJ, Forbes, HuffPo) picked up on a study by two sociologists who according to the “journalists” involved, found that people who telecommute work longer hours than those who don’t and therefore, telecommuting is not good for work-family balance. Of course, if the reporters actually READ THE STUDY instead of just the press release, they would have seen that the study: – used BLS data from 1995 – compared job categories against each other… Read more »

Of course. Sensationalism is not good journalism and the more the 24-hour news cycle continues to require volume of articles over quality, the less time insightful, well-intentioned journalists have to devote to research and nuanced reporting. The burden ever increasingly falls on the reader to follow up on a subject and develop their own depth of understanding of the content, which many readers simply won’t do. It’s an unfortunate trend, and one that I think we’ll have to live with. I’m not sure how anyone could work to reverse it. But that, too, is a totally different subject.

This is and seems to have always been an ongoing problem with the nature of “news” itself. Stories are brought up and only sometimes related with any depth or insight, but perhaps worse is that there is usually limited follow up and then none at all. Today’s crushingly urgent economic or social problem or scandal is tomorrow’s footnote and forgotten by next week. Centrally important to news having any value outside sensation and entertainment is providing context, and the ongoing rush of unrelated event all but guarantees that context will be impossible to establish and maintain. Even a huge number… Read more »

Clearly they are minimizing men’s efforts in order to show “women work more”, biased studies….Did they find men actually did more housework and outside work when you add up outside jobs or something? Another major oversight is you CANNOT COMPARE different job types. A person mowing the lawn where I live in summer for an hour will burn more energy and end up having heat stress vs someone inside doing the cleaning, especially with aircon. How many people are SOAKING with sweat from dusting, vacuuming etc inside? Try swing an axe in 30+ degree heat with high humidity and the… Read more »

There’s an argument to be made that many of those chores are ultimately optional, because they are based on choices that people made to have a lawn, have a garden, have a certain appearance to their house, etc. I don’t buy that completely, and I’m not saying that’s the case with your yard, but I would make some distinction between chores that people do in order to support something they don’t have to have and chores that are virtually unavoidable. Speaking for myself, if I bought a house with a huge yard so I could have a giant yard with… Read more »

well.
Note this is about couples, not an individual buying a big home with a big yard. Thus, both were involved in choosing the home, and that means the yard. So we can presume the wife likes/liked at purchase time, the big yard. Thus the guy is mowing, in a manner of speaking, for both of them.

That’s always been true in my family. We both hate yardwork so we hire it out when we can, but I’ve done loads of it. As well as taking the car in, and bills. Here is the thing. Running a successful (by modern middle to upper middleclass aspiration/expectations) household (house clean and lovely, food stocked and well cooked, children clean and cared for, clothes washed and ironed, yard neat and inviting, art, piano, dusted etc) could easily be a full time job. And it used to be and the woman of the middle and upper middle class was the manager… Read more »

My wife and I have an expression- life is too short to have a perfect-looking home, yard, etc.

Also, in a prior article of mine, someone suggested a “His list” “Her list” and “Hire someone list” to organize chores. Cleaning services like Merry Maids are relatively cheap- especially if you only hire them 1 or 2 times a week.

@Julie …I totally agree. I’m always uncomfortable going to someone’s home that’s picture perfect. Our home is / was people friendly. There was nothing that if it were broken that would cause any distress. It’s one thing to have grime, it’s another to simply be messy.

I find that much more inviting. A place in which you always feel you’re about to be shooed away from something and are afraid to touch anything or sit anywhere is something I’d rather see in a photograph than have to try to be comfortable, friendly, and relaxed in. If I’m wondering if I’ll be judged for using your footstool, I’d rather just be somewhere else.

As long as it doesn’t smell bad or look greasy or filthy, I don’t really care too much what a house looks like.

Well said. This is not only a problem for younger people, but for elders as well. Sometimes retired people, or people close to that age, find they don’t know what to do with themselves, since they have defined so much of their self-image by work. Some parents feel something of the same thing when the kids move out of the house — What do I do now? The answer is often to find busywork to do and give it undue priority. In the case of my own parents, I find that their greatest pleasure is to be together, but one… Read more »

@Sarah, the article says it and discounts it as housework. I see women mowing here but the majority of mowers are men where I live in Aus. Women tend to do inside housework more, but on the other hand I usually find women’s standards for cleaning are higher than mens and at times can create too much housework, by that I mean vacuuming multiple times per week when the floors still look clean. Seems most people here work fulltime, many of the men goto the mines to work 7, 14, 21, 30 days on with 7 day breaks with 12… Read more »

“Speaking for myself, if I bought a house with a huge yard so I could have a giant yard with short grass on it, then I’ve put that mowing labor on myself. I put myself in that position.” Yeah problem as you mention is if you don’t mow, you get snakes, taipans which can kill you pretty easily if you don’t get to hospital in time. Not to mention the social shaming that happens. It rains here a lot and I mow the lawn low, 3 days later it’s ready to be mowed again. Mowing also requires weed whacking/whipper snipping… Read more »

You raise some strong points. I grew up in a house in which we had to vacuum and polish the furniture every day. In college I had roommates who figured they might as well not even try to wash the dishes, because after a while, someone else would have to do it for them. As an adult, I visited the home of a friend who thought he shouldn’t flush the toilet because it wastes water. Everyone has different standards and viewpoints, and many devolve down to preferences and notions rather than necessity. Confusing the two is foolish and can cause… Read more »

Much appreciation on bringing this up. I’ve gotten into discussions with plenty of women who actively dismiss things like yard work, maintenance on vehicles, and working on the home. Usually the argument is that such things are “enjoyable to men” or that they don’t do them very often or some other bull. If that’s the case then how about an experiement where guys just stop doing that stuff. I mean since they just for fun they aren’t that necessary right? They aren’t vital tasks like laundry and cooking and cleaning inside the home? Let’s see how long the car lasts… Read more »

Danny- I like your way of thinking. I think there are 3 things going on: 1. It is easier to count and mesure time spent on regular chores, like cooking and laundry 2. There is a biased agenda by some researchers to highlight the plight of women (I am an academic researcher in my day job, and am acutely aware of how assumptions can intentionally or unintentionally skew social science studies) 3. Most “journalists” who pick up on these studies do so completely uncritically, magnifying the misconceptions in our culture Finally, I think we are getting through the phase in… Read more »

There is also the possibility that some studies only capture ‘chores’ that are done on a regular basis, some studies ask, “How many times have you done X this week”. This also excludes chores that men do that require a fair amount of hours but perhaps only are done once a month and they might not be captured at all. Also, in your number above, you said “First, the 2011 ATUS found that full-time employed men average 3.5 more working hours a week than full-time employed women. Second, the 2005 PSID found that, among dual-earner couples, women spend about 4.5… Read more »

This is exactly what I was thinking as I read, too, because I’ve seen it in my own marriage. My husband and I used to fight often about the fact that he expected me to do the dishes and laundry every day, while his main chores were mowing the lawn and taking out the trash once a week. Not to mention that lawn-mowing is seasonal while none of “my” chores can be dropped for 5-6 months of the year. (We don’t typically get enough snow to merit shoveling.) Then every once in a while he’d scrub the whole kitchen or… Read more »

Your comments raise another issue that needs to be a clearer part of this conversation. The housework that women do often tends to be more quotidian, associated with the day-to-day running of a clean and tidy house. The housework that men do can often be more occasional but more strenuous, physically demanding, and its results much more visible. This sort of housework makes a clear impression and will typically receive recognition and thanks. The housework that women do in such arrangements is far less likely to be noticed, because it blends into the background – maintaining the order and cleanliness… Read more »

Right on the money. Taking each other for granted is a serious mistake. It’s also an ongoing temptation which can be fallen into not with malice or a voluntary neglect, but simply by default, as it is easy to get used to what people do for us and not notice. When we let the good things others do for us become mere background noise, we go out of sync with our lives lives and relationships. Not appreciating the small and never-ending good things others do for us is a step away from living with full awareness and a step toward… Read more »